Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
One feature or characteristic of our customer's product that may not be applicable
to all types of manufacturing companies is the model year. Typically, automobile
manufacturers produce the same vehicle line year after year, but introduce a new
model year for every calendar year. It's a pretty safe bet that our customer would
like a
Total Model
Year
dimension in the database.
Another consideration with our customer's data is the type of customers. You will find
this to be true in many situations when dealing with an enterprise that manufactures
and sells a product. In the case of the Esscar Motor Company, vehicles are marketed
to retail customers and fleet customers. Retail customers are the typical private
consumers who buy one car at a time and the fleet customer is usually another
company or entity, that purchases many vehicles at once. The customer agrees he
needs a
Total
Customer
dimension.
The Esscar Motor Company produces and markets vehicles in several countries.
Would it be safe to say we need a
Total Market
dimension? If we structure the
Total Market
dimension properly, we can look at company performance by
individual country (
Market
) or by total country (
Total Market
).
Now that we have gathered the data attributes necessary for reporting, we have
one last requirement to fulfill. Our customer has asked if there is a way he can have
his data "as is", and prepare different versions of the data to help with analyzing
and strategizing. In other words, our customer needs to have the ability to create
full looks at the data with many different versions or
scenarios
. Thus, we provide a
Scenario
dimension. The customer can now create a forecast that has several looks
at the same data with only "what if" changes made and see the effects side-by-side
with the other scenarios. It's a beautiful thing!
The following is a quick visual that, we hope, gives you an idea of how the Essbase
outline will look. Please study it carefully. Understanding the hierarchical or
parent-child relationship between the members of the outline is critical with respect
to successful programming with Oracle Essbase.
Notice that the high level names are the data members or categories or as you will
soon come to know them, the dimensions, in the database outline that we have
discussed previously. Observe how the children members of the
Total Market
dimension will be added to summarize the value in the
Total Market
database
outline member.
